I'm not sure about altcoins. But BTC itself would be a nice start. I would love to donate, since i run all my machines on Gentoo. But for now it seems you have to use Paypal, which i don't have and i don't want.

Does anyone have a full grasp of how BitCoin works.. I'd love to see it get traction.. Who has some experience with it.

Let me know, I'm very interested..

Thanks

Why not just Google it? It's a P2P network.

Thanks, I have looked at the basics of bitcoin. I'm trying to find out the level of risk involved to have a business try to take advantage of the technology of making real bitcoin to $$ transactions and determine how safe and secure it is.. I know for sure I want to Eliminate the middle man - THE BANK...

Does anyone have a full grasp of how BitCoin works.. I'd love to see it get traction.. Who has some experience with it.

Let me know, I'm very interested..

Thanks

Why not just Google it? It's a P2P network.

Thanks, I have looked at the basics of bitcoin. I'm trying to find out the level of risk involved to have a business try to take advantage of the technology of making real bitcoin to $$ transactions and determine how safe and secure it is.. I know for sure I want to Eliminate the middle man - THE BANK...

It works on the principle of asymmetric encryption. If you want to send coins, you need to give evidence of inputs to your wallet address; you'll take this evidence, sign it using your private key and send the signed data to the receiver along with your public key so he can verify that it was YOU who send the key.

I'd say it is secure, and it becomes more and more secure as the time goes on (and new blocks are generated thus confirming transaction has been accepted).
I'm just worried about 2 aspects of bitcoin:

1:) netsplits (like, say, Australia has kinda shitty connection to the rest of the world. Netsplit at this point might couse 2 histories be developed, and one of those will be discarded once netsplit is over - I doubt bitcoin has any way to merge histories, everything I've found in this topic is "shorter history gets rejected")

2:) size of database. It's already like 10 GB even though bitcoin only excists since 2008 or so. And there is only 1 transaction every few seconds. What happens as the time goes on and it gains popularity? Bam, you can't keep a copy of a history on your PC anymore becouse you don't have space and bandwidth to do that. You need a BANK! no longer p2p.

I have been researching BTC (and also LTC) quite a bit, trying to figure out a) if it makes sense to try mining/farming it at this point, and b) possible connection points to my company's business interests.

There are many, many angles to this thing. dE_Logic's description of the mechanics of the transaction model are spot-on; it's built around public key cryptography. The actual generation of the currency is also related to cryptographic processing. The global transaction log, a.k.a block chain, is the ledger for all transactions, and by racing other machines/pools in the network to receive new transactions from the network, hash them & append to the block chain, nodes are awarded new *coins if they are the first to execute the number crunching entailed in concating onto the block chain. The polling & appending to the block chain occurs at a predictable rate, and there is a ceiling on the number of BTC that will ever be generated, and thus a cap on the circulation size the currency will ever reach (think it's like 21 million or something). There are also difficulty factors embedded into the network to throttle issuance of the coins. All the other *coins work the same way, with variance in the growth rate & ceiling of the currency, and the hashing algorithms used.

At least as far as BTC is concerned, my take on it is ... there is no point trying to mine coins as an individual anymore; this business is all farmed out. Now it's an arms race to invest in newer/bigger/faster dedicated hardware that is expressly built to hash faster & thus increase odds of earning *coins. Even that is getting consolidated. There are guys building datacenters whose sole raison d'etre is to house glorified graphics card web gardens & hashing-specific hardware, with the intention of selling space in the center to coin miners. LTC (litecoin) isn't quite there yet, but as BTC gets crowded and the LTC exchange rate climbs, more folks are funneling into that market. The same can be said of most of the other *coin markets.

Now you get into the trading markets & exchanges where people exit their *coins into hard currency, and vise versa. This is the interesting area of economic/social activiy/group psychology. There are a number of exchanges, and more are popping up all the time. Some exchanges have abruptly closed & absconded with millions of $$$ of *coins. There is also the ever-changing exchange rate of *coins back & forth to various hard currencies, and along with that, diverse tactics to manipulate the exchange rates, no different than equities. Some businesses are actually starting to take *coins for payment of services rendered, for example, Overstock.com I won't even go into the seedy underside of *coins, i.e. the black market cottage industry where people can buy whatever pleasure they want in *coins.

On top of all of this is uncertain climate of government regulation, which the technology itself makes very difficult if not impossible, but many nations are kicking around ideas on what should be regulated, and how this is done. I am studying all these things carefully. I want to get into the game somehow, but there are many profiteers/fraudsters/criminals trying to exploit it, so extreme caution is warranted. I am very interested in the recent hearings in the state of NY around potential *coin regulations, as that will be a test case for how the US might handle this thing moving forward.

Sk3l, afaik US government deals with bitcoin the same way it used to deal with internet -> "let it grow, and then find a way to make profit"
also, gpu mining is not effective anymore in case of bitcoins, you need hardware miner if you really want to have any profit. (cheap gpu gives you ~50-100M hashes/sec, cheap hw miner gives you 5G hashes/sec , and according to wiki bigger miners are more cost effective)

since all *coins are in fact clones of bitcoin, it's a bad idea to different kinds of those at the same time. It devaluates the strongest currency, introduces inflation (yeah, there is cap on every single *coin... but you can always add another *coin so there is no cap) and makes it more vulnerable to hacking -> the same computing power is spread among many networks, so every single network is weakened.

The trustees of the Gentoo Foundation discussed accepting bitcoin donations a while ago and decided against it.

The value of bitcoins fluctuates wildly and its not clear if the currency has a future at all.
Accepting donations of stocks was discussed at the same meeting and it was decided tah if that ever happened, the stock would be sold and not held.
Investing in stocks (even donated stocks) could give the foundation problems with the IRS.

I'll find a link to the log if anyone wants the details._________________Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

I'd say it is secure, and it becomes more and more secure as the time goes on (and new blocks are generated thus confirming transaction has been accepted).
I'm just worried about 2 aspects of bitcoin:

1 netsplits (like, say, Australia has kinda shitty connection to the rest of the world. Netsplit at this point might couse 2 histories be developed, and one of those will be discarded once netsplit is over - I doubt bitcoin has any way to merge histories, everything I've found in this topic is "shorter history gets rejected")

2 size of database. It's already like 10 GB even though bitcoin only excists since 2008 or so. And there is only 1 transaction every few seconds. What happens as the time goes on and it gains popularity? Bam, you can't keep a copy of a history on your PC anymore becouse you don't have space and bandwidth to do that. You need a BANK! no longer p2p.

Seriously, correct me if I'm wrong.

1) Yes, that's true, the longest chain is considered the other is discarded. This's a problem at low difficulty, right now it's very high. If you lost your transaction in a block chain fork (you call it 'netsplit'), the transaction won't exist and you'll get your coins back. That's exactly why we have 6 confirmations for a block.

2) There're a lot of transactions in a few seconds -- it's already very popular. If you don't wanna download the block chain use the lightweight wallet net-p2p/multibit. It syncs in a few minutes. Then you can use an exchange's Bitcoin address as your wallet. That way you don't need to run any client._________________Buy from companies supporting opensource -- IBM, Dell, HP, Hitachi, Google etc...
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Last edited by dE_logics on Sun Feb 09, 2014 3:08 pm; edited 1 time in total

The trustees of the Gentoo Foundation discussed accepting bitcoin donations a while ago and decided against it.

The value of bitcoins fluctuates wildly and its not clear if the currency has a future at all.
Accepting donations of stocks was discussed at the same meeting and it was decided tah if that ever happened, the stock would be sold and not held.
Investing in stocks (even donated stocks) could give the foundation problems with the IRS.

I would like to support with BTC and I believe theres many others out there.

"Why is Dell accepting bitcoin?
Bitcoin is a new payment option intended to offer even more flexibility for customers. Bitcoin payments can be made easily from anywhere in the world, and offer reduced payment processing costs."

rokj your complaining about something that is not going to change this main issue about the value of bitcoins being too fluid to account for. Plainly put, the advantages of using bitcoin does not out weigh the issues it causes (i.e. the accounting the stuff) including for only a small portion of people to use. Just because a few big companies even accept it has little meaning on the matter.

Although I agree that it would be cool, if you have Bitcoin that you want to donate to Gentoo, what's the impediment to you cashing that money in and then sending it to Gentoo? If that's all that's in your way, then you must not want to donate to Gentoo very badly. If you feel that I'm wrong (and I apologize in advance in case I am), then find a way.

- John_________________I can confirm that I have received between 0 and 499 National Security Letters.